Before introducing the fonera promise system of growing the Fon movement, namely to go from a system based on cash in which foneros paid for their foneras to a system based on trust in which they don´t pay but commit to keep them on we were converting 1% of the unique visitors to our web sites to become foneros.
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Last night, when we announced that today we were going to change our FONero distribution system in Germany, from a system based on credit card payments to a based on trust, I said that our objective with this “demonstration” was to create the largest public WLAN/WiFi network in Germany, free for Linus FONeros (Bill and Alien FONeros have to pay 10 euros for a 5 day pass to use it).

While T-Mobile, with its 4500 access points, is still the largest WiFi network, at Fon we believe that this won´t be the case for long. Since February, when FON started, we had deployed a total of around 3000 access points. But only today we have received 1800 orders for Foneras from people in Germany. So it is likely that in the next 3 weeks we will be the largest WiFi network in Germany.

In 5 hours we will make a big announcement in Korea: we will adopt the Fonero promise system in Korea and not charge for our Foneras. As Germans, Koreans have also shown a tremendous community spirit that has led to many Fonera sales, activations and registrations in our maps. In gratitude FON has decided to move from a system based on Fonera (FON social router) sales to a system based on trust and give Foneras away for free in exchange for a simple promise to leave them on, as we are also doing tomorrow in Germany and Austria.
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I am very happy to say that FON Germany will announce tomorrow morning that in Germany and Austria FON has decided to change our Fonera (wlan/wifi social router) distribution , from a system based on credit to a system based on trust. From tomorrow FON will not charge any money, nor ask credit card information to inhabitants of Germany and Austria who ask for a Fonera. The only request on FON’s part is that the FONeros simply promise to leave the Fonera on for the benefit of the fonero community. Should somebody who receives a fonera not want to be a FONero anymore all that we ask is that the Fonera be given out to another FONero candidate or tu us. That´s all. We will send one per household until supplies last.
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Tonight we registered the 100,000 fonero. We also ordered 100K foneras to be manufactured so we can clear the backlog that we have of registered but not yet active foneros. We only place the first large order this week because until this week we were still sorting out bugs on the first 10K shipment we got. They were not very important but we could not until now place large orders. We estimate that between now and the end of February we will place these 100K foneras. Again for comparison purposes T Mobile the largest wifi network in the world until we came around has around 25K public access points. In the last 24 hours alone we placed 800 access points.

I am glad to introduce our team in Japan, led by Junichi Fujimoto as CEO of FON Japan. Tomoyasu Chigahara, President, Munekazu Mishima and Nina Nikkhou are talso team members of FON in Japan.

I know my tone sounds like a FON promotion and in a way it is, as this is the blog of the entrepreneur who is building FON, but I don´t have any problems confessing that my happiness comes from the fact that we were trying to have Junichi Fujimoto run Japan for many months and I am so happy he accepted to do so.

Welcome Junichi and his team!
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